Dough made according to the preferred recipe for deep dish pizza crusts has special properties due to its yeasty composition. Being a bread type dough rather than a conventional pastry dough, deep dish pizza dough is very sticky and elastic and has a memory. Consequently, such dough is difficult to cut to a precise final size and cannot be radically deformed in a die. Furthermore, if too much pressure or shear is applied to deep dish pizza dough it will tear, will stick to the forming surface, or won't rise properly. Because of its special qualities, deep dish pizza dough cannot be processed by the typical automatic machinery employing male and female dies for shaping the crusts of dessert pies or conventional pizza shells.
Furthermore, deep dish pizza dough is preferentially formed into crusts having substantially vertical sides, while conventional pizza dough is formed into flat crusts and dessert pie dough is formed into crusts having a sidewall angle of about 130 degrees. Because deep dish pizzas have such steep sidewalls, they are even more difficult to form than other pies.
Deep dish pizza dough has heretofore been pressed into pans using manual labor rather than automatic machinery. The primary object of the present invention is to automate the process of making deep dish pizza crusts without compromising their shape, dimensional tolerances, or recipe.